


relearning

by alatarmaia4



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, You Know I Had To Write This, god molly is so good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-04-25 22:30:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14388435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alatarmaia4/pseuds/alatarmaia4
Summary: Molly's been through a lot. The circus helps him keep his head on straight and gives him time to figure some things out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so that molly backstory huh

Lucien had never expected anything like the curse.

It was a nasty piece of spellwork. They had missed a trap, searching through some old ruin near the Border Mountains with Xhorhas, and Lucien had been too eager to get inside the room it guarded and triggered it. 

For a while, it hadn’t seemed like it had done anything except release a puff of dust and smoke. Lucien had dismissed it, figuring it was too old and had stopped working, that whatever had been inside had lost its potency. 

Then he started losing things.

Not physical things. Smaller things. He didn’t even notice until Tyfel gave him a concerned look because he’d asked where they kept the fire lily petals, even though he kept everything they gathered under lock and key and they’d used the last of the fire lilies weeks ago. He should have known both of those things already. 

Lucien took some restorative tea, and turned down Cree’s offer to do her usual - Cree’s usual was more than necessary for a passing sickness. But it was not a passing sickness, and not even a usual sickness, as proved when even Cree’s skills failed to stop the slow trickle of his memories leaving his mind.

They tried everything. Lucien threw himself headfirst into research, into study, into possible cures. He had to solicit aid in reading after a certain point, because he’d forgotten half of what he’d learned of Abyssal. But nothing seemed to provide the answer for what, precisely, was being done to him. It didn’t matter how quickly they realized what had been responsible. Cree tried venturing back to the dungeon to bring back a bit of the dust for Zora to analyze, but all she found was regular dust. 

So they turned to the ritual. The curse was meant to destroy Lucien, obviously. None of his enemies could have arranged it better. And, Lucien explained, what could be worse than death?

If he died before the curse reached its completion, he could beat it at its own game. It was simple. He could trust the group to bring him back - they were too devoted to him to do anything else. Besides, the plan was only to imitate death long enough to fool a curse. People had been shocked back to life before - he’d heard stories. It couldn’t be that hard to mimic it, and he was stubborn enough to be ready and waiting to come back.

Lucien’s certainty was not swayed by the northern spellslinger’s avowal that if the ritual went wrong, no spell could bring him back. The rest of the group, fidgety and unsure, flocked to him as he had expected. They were reassured by his certainty, though the spellslinger called it arrogance. It was funny, watching Cree gently but firmly rip into her for a simple comment. They all had such faith in him.

The spellslinger - she didn’t. But she would, given enough time. When the ritual was done, it wouldn’t take long at all. And then it wouldn’t matter that he could no longer recall his father’s face, or the shape of the word that was his mother’s name. Half the time he forgot what his own name was - nobody called him Lucien, at least not to his face, anymore.

But what did that mean to him? Not much. A title was fine. A title made him an even taller figure in their minds, that was why he insisted on it. And if the spellslinger always sounded sarcastic when she used it, he could bear it for however long it took for her to stop.

Lucien was warned by the spellslinger before she ever began her preparations (but after her contract was drawn up). She made sure he knew that the ritual required faith from both directions - the group to him, and him to them. Lucien laughed in her face, and told her not to worry.

Preparations took a long while. Longer than he’d anticipated. The spellslinger’s other warning was that the less of him there was to bring back, the better, so Lucien ate less and cut his hair. Well, Cree cut his hair. Heavy chunks of hair that he had so painstakingly bleached fell to the ground, as Lucien did his best to relax. He couldn’t quite remember why he had brought Cree into the group in the first place, but she had gentle hands, which made things easier. At least now he wouldn’t need to touch up his roots. He had a feeling he’d forgotten where he put his tools for that. 

His head was cold, after. But it only took a week for Lucien to forget what the weight and warmth of long hair felt like. 

He dressed simply, when the time came. Better to come back in sparse and rough clothes than to come back missing half his tail for the sake of a well-made cloak. He didn’t care if he got these clothes dirty, anyway, and he had a feeling something like that might happen. 

It was too easy to mistake his followers for a group of strangers, now. They had left the ritual too long. Lucien hid the stirrings of anxiety behind a broad smile as the spellslinger ordered them all around, let himself be laid down in the center of an elaborate circle cut into the dirt and directed with how to hold himself. The ground was cold against the back of his head and pressed uncomfortably against his horns. 

Lucien was quiet, to let the spellslinger do her work. She was competent, even if she didn’t seem to like him much. He said nothing about the way he’d been forgetting steadily more and more, about how that morning he’d forgotten to even have breakfast, and even now he wasn’t sure what that word meant or what he liked most to have for it. He stared up at the sky. The trees above him waved in a gentle breeze. The spellslinger’s chanting faded into a white-noise drone.

What was her name again...?

He could feel his heart rate slowing. Steadily. Irrevocably. The gaps in between each beat were agony. He couldn’t breathe right. Oh gods, he couldn’t breathe. There was a heavy weight pressing down on his chest. His ribs were stiff as stone. He tried desperately to reach out, but his arms and legs felt leaden.

There were voices - whose voices? Was it comfort they offered? He could see nobody else. He could see only the trees above him, and even those were fading to the creeping darkness that was crawling up his limbs and over his eyes. Lucien struggled to keep his eyes wide open. The trees were fading. They were gone. The voices were gone. He was alone. 

Oh gods, he couldn’t breathe-

 

* * *

 

He breathed.

He choked. 

He was surrounded. There was only darkness. He coughed, but there was nothing but the darkness to draw into himself, and that filled him up and cut off everything. He couldn’t move. He reached out, pressing frantically until the darkness moved and shifted, until it cracked and he could surge towards the distant light that promised an end.

He pressed until the crack widened, and then he could sit up. Darkness fell over his face and down to the ground as he coughed, trying to get as much of it out of him as possible. There was wet stuff still clinging to him all over, but it was out of his eyes and it no longer blocked anything inside him. He tasted something terrible, and spat it out as best he could.

He looked up.

Dark shapes stood tall around him, the foundations of a rustling canopy. Above him light shown down from a dark expanse, speckled with tiny dots of pure white light. The source of the light he’d first seen was the biggest of these, round and smudged like it had fought the darkness and won.

_ Moon  _ drifted across his mind, sourceless. It was the moon. He knew that now. He knew something.

In the next second, he knew two things. The second thing was that he loved the moon.

The light felt like it was reaching down towards him, a protective barrier against the shadows surrounding him. It lifted a heavy weight from his shoulders, and his head felt clearer. He stared up at the moon until it started to hurt to keep looking. 

The darkness - the dirt - still clung to him, and he was still in it from the waist down. He kicked and struggled until the dirt shifted enough that he could clamber out of the long pit. He flicked his tail as it was freed - he had a tail. His feet were a dark color. 

He sat at the edge of the pit of darkness, staying within the pool of light, and looked down at what he could see of himself. There wasn’t much. He ran his hands over the parts he couldn’t see. The curl of his horns only barely outmatched the curve of his head, covered in short bristles of hair. The horns were sharp. It hurt to push the tip of a finger onto the tip of a horn, but didn’t draw blood. 

Names for things kept coming back to him. He felt like he knew an awful lot of things the longer he sat in the light. Mostly they were related to body parts and what he was wearing, which amounted to simple and now very dirty clothes. 

There were lots of things he didn’t know, still. He didn’t know why he’d been buried. He didn’t know why there were red spots on his hand that looked like eyes. He wasn’t sure how he knew what eyes looked like, since he couldn’t see his own. 

There were so many questions in his head. They were filling him up to the point of overflowing, but thoughts couldn’t overflow so they just got tangled up in each other and louder and  _ louder,  _ wanting to be answered. The moon was sinking down behind the trees, and a different light was turning the darkness away from the sky and making it yellow and blue. He pressed his hands over his eyes, but the light came through and turned his fingers a frightening color. It was like he could see where the bones were. He curled his legs up and became a huddle.

The moon left him, and the moonlight left him. There was warmth beating down on his head, uncomfortable and too hot. He had a head full of questions but where the answers should have been was

_ e m p t y _

 

* * *

 

He knew he was hungry but he did not know where to get food. When the moon came again he felt strength enter his limbs, and so he got up. Then he fell. It took several tries before he could stand, and follow where the moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves. 

He found a river, and drank. He still did not know where to get food. He kept walking, but when the moon left him again, his strength failed him and he could not walk any further. 

The moon came again, reliably. He uncurled himself to look up to it, and relaxed. It came back with reassuring certainty. The fragile strength came back to him, and so he used it to walk where he felt he was led. 

There was no river at the end of the moonlight. There was only more dirt, and trees. The moon left him for a third time, and he knew he did not have the strength to follow it if it came again.

He lay down against a tree, and waited for whatever would come.

 

Other things came before moonlight reached him. A heavy sound, a staccato sound. He wondered, dizzily, what ‘staccato’ meant. There was noise that made words that he knew were words but did not know the meaning of. 

Closer voices rang out. He wanted to open his eyes, but his eyelids only fluttered with the effort. He was too tired to flinch when strange hands touched his shoulders, his face. Someone put a hand nearly over his mouth. All he could do was breathe, breathe, breathe. The voices were not the source of the darkness that had choked him, but they might still try to. 

They did not try. The hands hauled him to his feet, which he tried to but could not stand on. They held him and stopped him from falling. His feet dragged as they carried him and placed him on a hard surface that was not dirt. More voices surrounded him. He tried to open his eyes and was granted a brief, blurry vision of heads bent over him. 

Something was put to his mouth which water dripped from. He drank as deeply as he could, thinking that it must be a waterskin - another new thing to know. The thing was withdrawn when he began to sputter against the flow. Drinking had reduced the fervor of the voices, but they still muttered over him. 

He breathed. The water tasted good and had washed away some of the foulness in his mouth. It was not as fresh or cool as the river, but it was good. 

He breathed.

He slept.

 

He woke to the feeling of cool moonlight on his face. 

The thing underneath him was shifting and rumbling with the same cadence as the noises from before. He knew it was a wagon. It was easier to know things, in the moonlight. But he was not in the same place he had been. There were soft things underneath him now, not hard wood. And he could feel from the air around him that he was not outside. The air did not move like it would if he were in an open cart. He blinked open his eyes. They were full of grit from sleep, so he rubbed at them with one shaky hand.

He was inside a wagon with a roof. He didn’t know those were a thing that existed. There were no lights, but the windows were open, one on each side. Moonlight sporadically flickered over his face, and over the plethora of boxes which were squeezed into available floor space and stacked on top of each other. 

His hand shook. He became aware that he was still hungry. And there were soft things on top of him as well. A blanket. A flat pillow under his head. He stroked the blanket. It was the softest thing he’d ever touched. 

His arm got tired easily, or else he would have kept stroking it just to feel the sensation of it against his fingers. Now that he was awake, he couldn’t fall back asleep. He didn’t want to, but some part of him said that this was a time when things slept. But the moon was up, so he would be as well. 

Eventually the wagon stopped. The sound of the hooves of whatever drew it and the rumble of the moving wheels slowed creakily. Now he knew what wood creaking sounded like when not from live trees. He still had very few answers for the questions that had mostly stopped careening through his mind.

Footsteps and voices moved around the wagon and to the other side from him. A door opened which he had not noticed, letting more moonlight into the wagon. He closed his eyes, to let it wash over him, but opened them again when the footsteps navigated their way closer. 

A lanky man stood over him, looking down curiously. His ears were slightly pointed. He grinned as soon as his gaze was met, and said something enthusiastic. 

It almost made sense, with the moonlight and the rest. But the emptiness still echoed in his mind. There was a long period of confusion, and as many languages as could be tried were tried, until he thought he understood what was being asked of him. They wanted a name. They wanted an answer.

He hadn’t even thought about names. It was all just empty.

He did not realize he had said anything out loud, until his throat hurt and the man startled. A question was repeated - curious, one word.

Once he had said it, he could not stop saying it. It was all empty. He had no answers. It was emptiness. It was the only thing he knew to say. He said it until his throat was too sore to keep talking and there were worried looks being directed down at him and he was practically convulsing with anxious energy.

Hands pressed him back down onto the soft things when he twitched and tried to get up. He was given water again, and food which he tore into. Even a little was enough to make his hunger wake back up and roar for more. But the silent pleading reach of his hands was refused, and things were said in patient tones that he thought a reason was probably being explained to him. He was not sure if he could judge if it was a good one yet. 

He was coaxed out of the cot-bed, though he could not stand very well yet. The man had gone and then come back before trying to take him out. He balked at the door of the wagon. It seemed like a long way to the ground for his shaky legs. But the man let him carefully sit down at the end of the wagon so that he could look out the door of it and not leave. 

There was a fire outside, and more people grouped around it. They all had turned to look at him. There were many he had not seen before, including a great hulking figure he had not seen before looming over a tiny girl.

They raised their voices with questions, but the first man shushed them, saying what was likely an explanation in a low voice. He watched the group, eyes flicking from one stranger to another as they listened to the explanation. None of them looked bad, but the large one made him shiver. 

They went around and gave him words for themselves. They gave him names. There was Gustav. There was Bo. There was Orna. There was Toya-and-Kylre. There was Mona-and-Yuli. There was Desmond who had said nothing. He liked Desmond. Desmond gave him a bowl of something hot that filled his stomach, and let him sit quietly and look up at the moon. 

The fire was warm, even though he was sitting far away from it. He sat until the fire had burned low and all the named strangers had retreated into tents to sleep, and was glad that the moon had brought him somewhere pleasant. 

 

When the moon left and the sun came, he was not tired enough to sleep because he had slept a little towards the end of the night, so he stayed awake. There was much talking among the named ones as they packed up their tents. They made more food to eat and gave him some again. The strength was coming back to him, slowly, even without the moonlight.

Some of the talking seemed to involve him, because he was pointed at a lot. He ate quickly in case the talking meant they wanted to stop giving him food. But Gustav only came over to him again, and asked him something. It sounded like the question from the night before. Frustrated, he curled his legs up again defensively. Why didn’t they believe him? He was telling the truth. It was all empty, empty, empty except for questions.

He didn’t realize (again) that he’d been repeating the word out loud again until Gustav had to shake him to get him to stop. He breathed, and shivered, and saw the significant looks Gustav traded with the others. 

They coaxed him with the promise of more food out of the wagon, and gave him a long coat to wear. It was not as soft as the blanket. They helped him up onto the seat at the front of the wagon, where Gustav held the long reins of the horse that drew it. It was warm outside, but he still huddled into the coat, confused and unsure of himself or the stability of his seat. 

The fresh air blew into his face with the breeze as Gustav drove the wagon along, with two others following a long. The named ones had an awful lot of things to carry. He relaxed, slowly, as the trip wore on with little sign of danger. Even if the moon wasn’t out, it wasn’t too bad.

The wagon eventually came within sight of a little town. He stared at the buildings and the people, very sure he had never seen anything like it before. There were people in shiny, hard clothes standing where the road passed the first buildings and holding tall pointy weapons. He listened to Gustav talk to them, wondering how he knew what a weapon was. Normally he only knew things when the moon was out. 

Gustav was talking about him. He knew because he was being gestured towards. The ones with weapons shook their heads and said negative things. He concentrated hard and listened harder, and understood a little. Gustav wanted to know if they knew him. The ones with weapons did not. That was disappointing. If someone knew him, they could give him answers.

The wagon rolled on. Gustav was frowning. He hoped that Gustav wasn’t angry. He liked Gustav.

Nobody tried to make him move when the wagon stopped, except for encouraging him to get down from the high seat, which he did willingly. His arms and legs shook less now when he used them, though he still took any offered food eagerly when it was made and passed around. 

The named ones swarmed around their carts for the better part of the afternoon, taking things off them and setting up a larger tent than any of the ones they’d set up before. It was a long and arduous-looking process, or else he would have tried to help. They did so much to help him, after all. So he brought water to people who looked like they needed it, and was always rewarded with a surprised smile and kind-sounding words.

The little one, Toya, liked to follow him around. He didn’t like that, because Toya was in turn followed or watched by Kylre, and Kylre still made him nervous. Kylre was too big. So he avoided Toya until she got a clue, and then things were fine.

He watched through the back of the tent, as the performance that night was performed. He barely even noticed the rising of the moon; his eyes were glued to what view he had through a gap in the tent flaps. It was so colorful, and pretty, and Toya had such a nice voice when she wasn’t talking. He hadn’t expected anything like that. 

There was so much talking during the show and in the audience nearby that when Gustav came out and laughed at him when he jumped to his feet so eagerly, and asked if he had liked it, he understood the question so well it surprised him. And Gustav seemed pleased by his nodding an answer, too.

Everyone seemed pleased if he could answer their questions, which he got better at as days passed. They didn’t ask him things about himself anymore, but they asked if he was hungry, if he liked the show, if he wanted to see a cool trick, if he wanted to perform something himself. Except for the last one, usually the answer was yes, but there was laughter that came with the last one, so he was pretty sure it was a joke. Jokes were new. He liked them.

He was allowed to keep the borrowed coat, and later Gustav gave him things to wear other than the dirty clothes he’d always owned. They were not soft like the blanket either, but they were clean and brightly colored. He liked them, too. 

He started sleeping more at night to match the circus’s schedule. He knew it was a circus because Gustav had told him the name of the circus. He liked Gustav, too, because Gustav let him stay in the wagon even when he couldn’t use the cot-bed anymore because it was Gustav’s first.

And when he woke suddenly at strange times, unable to breathe from fright he couldn’t remember the source of and didn’t understand, Gustav only grumbled a little before getting up to wrap an arm around him and let him huddle into Gustav’s side while the fright worked its way out of his system. 

They left the little town and traveled more, and the road they traveled on took them through rolling hills and in sight of fields and scattered little houses. But only within sight. Gustav stopped their traveling earlier than usual.

Around the dinner fire, he listened attentively to Gustav as Gustav spoke. Listening gave him more words, and words made it easier to put thoughts together in his head. Putting words to thoughts sometimes made them quiet down. Most of the questions were gone now, because he had figured out that their answers were ‘I don’t know’. 

“We’ve got to get a name on the papers for MT here before we get into a new town,” Gustav was saying. ‘MT’ had maybe been a joke at first, but it was what everyone kept calling him, so he accepted it. They wanted pretty badly to call him something. “If he’s sticking with us, he can’t just be coincidentally hanging out in our group forever.”

There was a long debate. Many suggestions were considered. Mona-and-Yuli kept making purposefully dumb or silly suggestions, just to see him grimace. He turned down ‘Michel’ and ‘Malik’ and ‘Menon’ and all sorts of others. Yuli said, jokingly, that he should at least have a good halfling surname like Tealeaf, and seemed surprised when he nodded. 

“Well, that’s one half down, at least,” Gustav said. “I don’t know if we’ve done much but eliminate half the names that start with ‘m’ in existence. What about...I don’t know, mollymawk? It’s like a type of bird. Is that suitable?” 

He thought about it. He put ‘mollymawk’ and ‘tealeaf’ together in his head, and put ‘I’ and ‘am’ in front of it. It did not make a bad sentence. He nodded.  


“Then it’s settled!” Gustav said cheerfully, with a wide grin. “Now come with me, your signature has got to be on your papers.”

The inside of Gustav’s wagon was always a nice place to be. Gustav sat at his tiny desk and carefully added some details to a few pieces of parchment while Mollymawk lurked behind him, watching the quill form letters. He was better at letters than he expected to be, but he still liked watching people write more than he liked writing himself.

“Damn,” Gustav hissed after a moment. “It’s a w, not a u, isn’t it?” He looked up at Mollymawk. “Do you mind one letter of difference?”

Mollymauk shook his head.

“Well, good, because you can’t erase ink.” Gustav finished writing in the name, with considerably more care, and then put the quill down. “We’ll let that dry, and then you can sign it. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to look official.”

Mollymauk tapped Gustav’s shoulder, then pointed at the name, then shrugged and looked at Gustav.

“What? Is it not right?”

Mollymauk shook his head and repeated the series of gestures.

“Are you asking a question?” Nod. “About the name...why the name?”

Mollymauk nodded, put two fingers around the beginning and end of where ‘Mollymauk’ was written, and did the exaggerated shrug gesture again.

“Why ‘Mollymauk’?” Nod. Gustav leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know...a mollymawk’s a big sort of bird, like an albatross, you know?” Mollymauk shook his head. “Well, it is. It’s got a lot of significance about it to sailors. They say they’re the spirits of those who drowned at sea. A little morbid, but...you know, they’re such big birds and they can go such long distances anyway, despite how heavy they are. You always seemed like you had something heavy on your mind, or maybe your shoulders, when we first came across you.”

Mollymauk tilted his head curiously. Gustav wasn’t wrong, but the strange weight had been lifted by the moonlight before he met any of the circus people. 

“Maybe that’s rude to say,” Gustav said, chuckling. “But, you know, that ‘empty’ stuff was pretty unnerving. You’ve got a lot going on in your head, I can tell.” He paused, like he was waiting for Mollymauk to say something. Mollymauk did not. “Anyway. The ink’s probably dry now, if you want to sign.”

Gustav let him take the seat and pointed out the right place to sign. Mollymauk, with extreme care, took the quill and copied the shape of the letters Gustav had written down.

“Well,” Gustav said with surprise. “You’ve got nice handwriting. Anyone ever tell you that?”

Mollymauk shrugged. His signature was very loopy. He tried to memorize how it looked, in case he forgot that he knew it. 

Gustav clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s settled, at least. Come on, Mollymauk. Let’s get this show on the road.”


	2. Progress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone commented on this like "i'm so glad you wrote a molly and gustav fic!" and i was like "....did i?", because in my head it was molly backstory. but then i realized that not only was gustav the ONLY other character I tagged, it was DEFINITELY a story about molly and gustav. 
> 
> so enjoy some more of it

Mollymauk stayed with the circus. He helped carry things when they needed to be carried, if they were small enough for him to list. He learned new things for him to know, like how to judge a crowd or know who was the right person. Orna liked to take him with her when drumming up excitement for the show, because she said he was good at guessing how people were going to react to something. 

Mollymauk liked to make people excited. It was fun, to persuade them into attending and then see their delighted faces in the audience. He didn’t speak to customers any more than he did to his friends, but he waved people hello and goodbye and used the juggling skills Desmond had taught him to draw people towards the tent. He was good at smiling in a way that reassured people.

Sometimes people came over just to stare at him. Mollymauk knew they probably didn’t see many tieflings (he never did) and purple was an uncommon color (warm colors appeared far more often on the ones he had seen). Plus his hair was growing out slowly, making the horns all that more prominent, and he couldn’t hide all the red eye tattoos. He discovered, when Mona or Yuli mentioned them, that he had one on his neck that he couldn’t see. 

When it was warm enough out, sometimes he let Toya draw over or around the eyes with charcoal or dirt. Only on the ones on his hand, though. He’d gotten used to Kylre so he didn’t avoid either of them anymore. Kylre, despite his appearance, wasn’t so bad. Once Mona and Yuli offered to cover up the red in the things, and despite his better judgement Mollymauk let them try and give him a terrible stick-and-poke tattoo on top of the ones he already had. But whenever they tried to put a different color over the red, it faded away in a matter of seconds. Nobody seemed to know why; Mollymauk felt like he  _ should,  _ but he didn’t. 

The tattoos made him more uncomfortable, after that. He traced his fingers over them, and over the scars that decorated his wrists and lower arms. He couldn’t see them as well, but he knew from being told that the scars were on his chest, too, all the way up to his neck. It explained why he couldn’t turn his head very far before the skin got all tight and wouldn’t give any further. Maybe that was why sometimes he still got panicky about being able to breathe. 

Mollymauk wondered, occasionally, why he had been buried. He knew what a grave was, now. But thinking about it made him feel shivery and want to sit out under the moonlight again, so he tried to leave the topic alone and leave it behind him.

It didn’t matter why. Whatever had happened had happened to someone entirely different. Mollymauk was aware that there could have been no good reason for being buried, or not remembering a bit of his life prior to awakening underground. Better to leave it behind him and make something interesting of himself than to constantly be wondering with no way of being answered.

 

One time, about six months into working with the carnival, Molly decided that Mollymauk was too long of a name. 

“What?” Orna said, when he got her attention after she referred to him as ‘Mollymauk’. Molly pointed at himself, then made a gesture like he was pushing something together. “Still, what?”

Molly spelled out  _ n-a-m-e  _ with the finger letters she had taught him (“I had a cousin who used to talk like this” she’d said) and made the pushing gesture again.

“Are you getting tired of your name?” Orna asked, sounding amused. Molly shook his head. “You just want a smaller one for no reason then. No? Oh, shorter! Shorter name! You want a nickname?”

Molly nodded, then spelled out  _ m-o-l-l-y.  _

“Yeah, sure, Molly. It’s easier to yell at you when I need your attention, anyway.”

Molly stuck out his tongue at her. Orna laughed, and tousled the unkempt mop of hair that was beginning to fall into his eyes. 

Physical affection was common in the circus. Molly had tolerated touches at first, when he didn’t have the energy to refuse, and then he’d been curious about the intent of the touching. Desmond had liked to run his hands over Molly’s head when his hair was still short enough to be tickly, and Mona and Yuli were in near-permanent states of physical contact and liable to rope others into their circle if anyone got too close. Gustav hugged people and had nearly cried the first time Molly had clumsily initiated one. 

Molly liked giving out kind touches and receiving them in turn, even if he had to be careful with his horns whenever he hugged someone. Ever since he’d been gifted with some costume jewelry (Gustav claimed they were a reward for six months of sticking around and doing a good job, but everyone had been too excited to see him try on things specially made for tieflings), remembering to be careful with his horns had been even more important. 

But the jewelry was lovely. Molly had pleaded as best he could without his voice for them to pierce his ears so he could wear the dangling sword earring (half of a pair) and fasten the chain from the ‘silver’ horn cover to the other one. He liked to flick all the dangling bits with a finger, the sword and the chain and the little moon that dangled from the silver cover with its blue glass teardrop, and feel the slight weight of it pull back and forth. 

After that, the rest of the jewelry he accumulated was inevitable. Molly didn’t care that he was making himself even more noticeable; if he was going to be noticed, it might as well be for how shiny he was rather than the red tint of his eyes (which he himself had been startled by two months in when he finally looked in a mirror) or the scars which his shirt could not completely cover. 

Of course, there was only so much jewelry one person could fit on themselves without crossing the line from ‘fantastical’ into ‘tacky’, though the line was significantly farther away for a carnie. Molly might have had a tendency to use his horns as a necklace rack, or so Orna accused, but he knew where a good place to stop was. Even if he did want to decorate himself a little more.

And hey, he already had  _ one  _ tattoo.

Orna came with him to get the flowers over his shoulder so she could explain what he wanted to the artist. She rolled her eyes the whole time, but Molly saw her nodding appreciatively at the sketches that were made. Molly’s shoulder hurt for days, but the flowers looked beautiful and perfectly hid the red eye that still wouldn’t take ink. 

Toya said he should show off the art more, but that wasn’t the point. Molly didn’t try to explain his thoughts to her, though. He wasn’t sure if he could put into words why it mattered that there was something that only he could see, that was present yet hidden beneath his normal clothes. It was something for him to look at, when he could turn his head far enough, not something shiny and glittery to attract people so Orna could persuade them to hand over five copper for the show. Not something for anyone to gawk at the way they always gawked at him.

But he was something to look at, when it came down to it. That was his job with the circus. Be something interesting to look at so people would come listen to Orna. So more tattoos were added to the canvas; a snake coming out from under the flowers because of that one play Desmond loved to recite from, curling around his hand so that each of its eyes were one of the original red eyes. He got another private one on his back, which was entirely pointless except to be something he knew was there that was just for him. He added more flowers, a sun and moon on the other shoulder, a peacock that curled up over his ear and onto his face.

That one  _ really  _ hurt. But the stares turned more and more often from faint revulsion to fascinated curiosity, so that was better.

It felt like he was taking charge of himself. Molly didn’t know where the hell he was going, but he was determined to enjoy himself along the literal and metaphorical road. Why not make himself something nice to look at? Why not decorate himself any way he wanted? It was his body. He could still hug with it if there were tattoos on his skin and clinking charms dangling from his horns. He could still juggle shitty swords while he walked behind Orna without letting one hit her on the head like the first time he’d tried. 

And Toya liked the tattoos. She liked to look at the intricacy of them, the faint inked shimmer of the snake’s scales and the curve of the peacock feathers. Molly liked Toya; she was the opposite of him, shit at talking but always doing it anyway. If he hung out with her, there were no odd pauses like the others left where they were used to someone else filling out the conversation; Toya talked enough for two. Molly was pretty sure everyone else liked when he hung out with Toya, because apparently before he’d shown up she always talked to Kylre and let him pass on messages to everyone else. 

His opinion of Toya was that she only talked to him because he wouldn’t repeat anything that she said to anyone else. She’d been nervous about speaking for so long that Molly was the only one who wouldn’t make a huge deal out of being spoken to by her. So she talked to him a lot. Sometimes even without Kylre, which Molly appreciated. It could only be so not-awkward when there was a huge lizardfolk looming over you. 

Toya was the one who gave him the seaglass she found as a gift to embellish his swords. When he said, even more croakily than her, “Thank you,” she looked at him like he’d given her the moon. 

Talking was...a process. Molly didn’t strictly need to talk, and he’d gotten along fine without talking so far. But like Orna said, it was easy for him to read people. He couldn’t give Orna clues about who looked wary but intrigued and needed just a wink and a flash of a poster, or who needed some gentle persuasion before they could come around to the idea. Sign language was too clunky; even whispering things to her would be shifty. 

So Molly thought about it for a long while. There was nothing wrong with his voice, and there never had been. Words just took a while to come to him. He was still stumbling across some he didn’t know, though more and more often they were words in strange songs Desmond sang that nobody else knew either (except Desmond, though sometimes even he wasn’t sure). There would probably be a lot of hubbub if he started talking out of the blue. People would be excited. Gustav would probably be thrilled out of his mind.

At dinner that night, when Desmond was pretending he couldn’t think of any songs to play, Molly said, “I like the one about the man in the moon getting drunk.” His voice was still terrible, hoarse and scratchy and with a tendency to fade out in weird spots. 

Toya gasped; Desmond lost his concentration on the spell that kept his violin aloft and had to grab it before it hit the ground. Mona and Yuli looked right past him and out into the darkening evening, not immediately realizing where the voice had come from. Orna, on his other side, turned to stare at him.

“Well, you heard the boy, Desmond!” Gustav bellowed, grinning broadly. Molly started to grin too, as Gustav slung an arm around his shoulders and squeezed him tight. “Play us his favorite!”

Desmond set to playing so enthusiastically that he slipped up more than Molly had ever heard him slip before. It was the best performance Desmond ever gave, in Molly’s opinion, and that opinion never ended up changing. 

When Desmond finished he gave a flourish and a bow, then looked at Gustav and said “Is it time, do you think?”

Confused, Molly looked between them as Gustav nodded and stood up. Everybody else seemed to know what he meant, even Toya, who was smiling like she was trying not to. 

“We got you a little something,” Orna told him, as Gustav ducked inside his wagon. “It was  _ meant  _ to be for you being with us for a whole year. But now seems like a good night for it, yeah?”

“What kind of something?” Molly asked. Orna grinned like she couldn’t believe she was really hearing him.

“Wait a second for Gustav to unearth it from where he’s hidden it.” 

“You’ll like it,” Desmond promised. Molly raised an eyebrow, trying to look unimpressed. 

Nearly everyone leaned forward in anticipation when Gustav emerged with a small bundle. He handed it over with grave ceremony to Molly, still grinning.

“What do you think?” He asked. Molly examined the thing. It was not wrapped, which had been his first impression, but a bundle of cloth folded over on itself. He stood up and shook it out, and four panels of a long coat unfolded. A hood decorated with crescent moons hunt from the shoulders, and in lieu of sleeves there were drape-y cloth bits lined with the same cloth. Molly turned the coat around, and the embroidered moons shone faintly in the light.

“This is so expensive,” he said in astonishment, still croaky. The coat was soft underneath his now-calloused fingers. 

“It was worth it,” Gustav said with certainty. Molly looked over the coat, noting all the other tiny details of embroidery. There were suns and moons like the ones on his shoulder, a flower unfolding on the back like his first tattoo, snakes and spiders and alchemical symbols and a feathery green pattern like the one that now spread over his chest and collarbone. The coat, he realized, was in colors that would go very well with the vest that Orna had outgrown and given to him months ago. That had to be on purpose. They had had the coat  _ custom-made  _ for him.

“Oh, Molly, don’t cry,” Orna said. Molly sniffed in response and pressed the coat against his cheek. It was  _ really  _ soft, compared to anything else he’d been given to wear. “We didn’t spend  _ that  _ much money on it.”

“Is it that bad?” Gustav teased. Molly snorted, and shook his head.

“It’s good,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Thanks.”

“Well, put it on!” Mona shouted impatiently. With the greatest care, Molly slid his arms through the sleeves and settled the coat over his shoulders, pulling his hair out from underneath. It wasn’t long enough to brush the ground, just barely hanging past his knees. The hood was big enough to fit over his horns. Molly ran his hands over the front of the coat, feeling the smooth ridges of embroidery and soft cloth, and sighed with pleasure. 

“This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever given me,” he said.

“That’s not a hard bar to hurdle if you’re basically a toddler,” Yuli said, and then yelped when Orna pinched her. 

“I’m glad you like it,” Gustav said. He ruffled Molly’s hair, which was getting rather long. “Now your look’s really complete! All you need is a decent haircut. Orna’s skills can only take you so far, my boy.”

Molly just nodded. He was still looking over the coat, finding all the little details of it. It would be  _ terrible  _ to keep it clean. He already loved it and knew what a headache he would get from it. 

The warm feeling that settled in his chest as soon as he put it on did not go away for a long, long time. 

 

Molly hadn’t really expected it, but when he talked to people, he got a lot closer to them. After he told Orna that he liked the feeling of her braiding his hair, she developed a tendency to randomly plunk herself down next to him and start braiding. When he told the sisters they were terrible while he was grinning at whatever they said, instead of just grinning, they laughed and Gustav looked relieved. And Gustav talked to him more while they traveled, now that he knew a conversation was an option. 

Molly’s voice got better the more he used it, too. After only a little while and lots of water he stopped sounding so much like Toya and discovered that his voice carried a lilt that sounded a lot like Gustav’s, and he could sing passably well if he tried. Desmond taught him a few songs, usually for lack of anything more interesting to do while traveling.

Normally, Molly paid attention. 

Bandits were not anything unusual. They had had run-ins with such groups before, normally ending with the bandits scared off by their proximity to towns or Orna’s fire magic and the rest of the group’s swords. Or just Kylre. But Molly turned his head not because they were being attacked, but because his ears caught the distant clash of steel.

Desmond’s bow faltered on the strings of his violin as he craned his neck to look around Molly. The trees blocked them from seeing the source of the noise.

“Gustav?” Desmond called.

“I hear it,” Gustav said. The speed of their trio of wagons had slowed. “...We should carry on. We can’t afford to get into a fight.”

“Are you su - Molly!”

Molly was ten feet away the road by the time Desmond called his name. 

He’d never  _ really  _ run before, not even in the town where they’d called him demon-spawn and Xhorhas-blooded and they’d had to pack up quick because nobody wanted to come to the show, and maybe did want to do worse besides. It turned out he was very fast, even darting between trees. 

The fight was closer than he’d expected. There were three of them, plus a fourth who stood out from the rest. Molly arrived and then had to dodge out of the way as one of the bandit-looking fellows was knocked backwards by a powerful punch. 

The fourth, a tall woman, was looking rough. Even as she knocked one of them back a second was swinging his sword towards her neck. Molly lunged at that one, both his scimitars already in his hands. 

It was a  _ fight,  _ a proper fight. Molly found himself moving quicker than he could believe of himself. His scimitars met the bandits’ shoddy steel and rang out at the clash. But he thought too hard about it, or maybe took a second too long to revel in his newfound skill, one of them managed to knock one scimitar out of his hands. 

Molly swung the second up to block the man’s swing. They were locked in a standoff, snarling at each other over their blades. Then the man suddenly gave a shove, and Molly’s blade was forced downwards. Molly turned the slip into a swing that arced upwards, but he nicked his wrist on the way down.

A searing flash pain - strange and not equivalent to the wound - accompanied the sudden snap and flash of cold. Ice crystalized along the edge of the blade as it bit into the bandit’s side. Molly flinched backwards in surprise as the bandit staggered. His wrist was bleeding onto the cuff of his vest, and the ice shone, just as sharp as the blade it covered. 

The injured fighter made another lunge towards Molly. That was about when Kylre arrived and started squeezing the life out of him. 

“What the fuck, Molly!” Orna was hot on Kylre’s heels, fire licking up her hands. She brought them up, and Molly turned in the same direction she was facing to see the tall woman holding the third bandit by the neck, looking at the two of them.

“Who are you?” She said warily.

“Personally, I’m here to help,” Molly said, at the same time that Orna said “Who are  _ you?”  _

“You have some interesting skills,” the woman said. Molly glanced down at the icy sword; so did Orna.

“What the fuck,” Orna said again. Kylre tossed aside the now-deceased bandit. Gustav came running up at last, his own short sword unsheathed.

“What’s happening?” He demanded. The bandit in the woman’s grasp made a choking sound. She looked down at him, and then dropped him and let him pull himself away. 

“I was handling it,” she said.

 

Yasha, as it turned out the woman’s name was, was fascinating. Molly sat next to her in their makeshift camp, listening intently as she explained how she’d been traveling alone and unexpectedly set upon by bandits who figured their odds were better, three against one, despite the size of her muscles. Even she’d been beginning to doubt her own chances, when Molly had appeared out of nowhere.

Molly’s part in the fight was the subject of much debate. Orna had already cuffed him around the head for running off. But they believed him readily enough when he said he didn’t know how the ice happened, and his scimitar was taken and examined by nearly everyone until the ice melted off due to the proximity of the fire. None of them had any idea how it could have happened either. 

“I wonder,” Molly said, turning the sword over in his hands. The glass jewels in the hilt flashed in the firelight. “I’ve never felt anything like that before. Not even with the ice, just in...well, it  _ felt  _ like something happened, too.”

“I imagine because something  _ did  _ happen,” Yuli said. Mona snickered. Molly looked up, because he could feel someone’s eyes on him, and met Yasha’s measured gaze.

She held it for a moment longer, then glanced down. Molly looked back down, and saw that she was looking at the bandage which was still wrapped around his wrist. Blood had partly soaked through it, leaving a rusty red stain on the outward-facing side. The cut had stopped hurting after Orna had slathered the stuff she put on burns on it, at least, and he was pretty sure it had scabbed over by now.

Funny thing: he hadn’t realized until that exact moment that the ice had appeared right after he’d cut himself. 

Slowly, Molly reached down and grasped one of his blades. Gustav and Orna both looked over at the movement, curiosity and wariness respectively crossing their faces. 

Swiftly enough that nobody had the time to do more than leap to their feet or lunge towards him, Molly drew the blade across his arm. There was a biting pain, and blood spilled over the metal. Just as Orna seized his other wrist and jerked the scimitar away, frost cracked and crystallized along the edge, just as it had before. 

The scene froze. Molly imagined how comical it must have looked to someone with the right perspective. One of his horns was digging into Orna’s boob from the awkward angle she’d gone at his hand from, and her arm was extended fully, forcing him to brandish the icy blade. Gustav had leaped to his feet, and Desmond had paused with a spoon halfway to his mouth. Toya had gasped, and her gaze was on his bloody arm. She looked fit to cry at any moment. 

Yasha was staring at him, blank-faced and intense.

“What the fuck, Molly!” Orna spat out. “You don’t go slicing yourself up like that!”

“I just wanted to see if it would work,” Molly said.

“I don’t care if that head of yours is as empty as your coinpurse, you  _ don’t  _ do that.” Orna let go to cuff him around the back of the head, which was the only spot she could hit without banging her wrist on his horns. “Can’t believe we have to  _ teach  _ you that.” She stomped off. 

“How did you do that?” Mona demanded, looking at the ice. It was steaming, but showed no sign of melting from the fire’s heat.

“I don’t know,” Molly said, lowering the scimitar. “This doesn’t happen when  _ you  _ cut yourself, does it?”

“No, not for most people,” Gustav said, though the question had clearly not been intended for him. “Seems you have a fair bit more talent than we knew. You didn’t...remember how to do that, did you?”

“No,” Molly said. “There’s still nothing. But the first time it happened after I cut myself, so...” Molly swung the scimitar experimentally a few times. It moved as cleanly as though there weren’t a lot of ice crystals dulling the keen edge of the blade. There wasn’t any point to using it now, when all the bandits were gone, so he laid it aside. He doubted it would fit in its sheath until the ice wore off, whenever that would be. 

“Why would you need to remember?” Yasha asked. It was one of the few things she’d said, and made everyone else look up with interest. Even Orna, returning, paused to give her a curious look before sitting down and roughly giving Molly’s new cut the same treatment she’d given the first. Molly winced at the sting of the salve.

“Why shouldn’t I?” He said, mustering a grin to flash at Yasha. She cocked her head, strangely-colored eyes flashing in the firelight. 

“Why indeed,” she said slowly, and asked nothing more of him for the rest of the night.

 

That was when Molly decided they were friends, of course.

 

Sure, he could have decided that when they fought of the specter together after it refused to stop haunting their campsite. Maybe that was the circus’s fault for choosing a secluded grove to camp in, but the specter still ended up dead. And then there was the time she had bodily thrown him into the back of a wagon when he’d gotten back to hightail it out of town nearly too late, which Molly had been pretty into. He’d asked her to do it again several times, until she spun him around, pulled his coat off, and hurled him into the nearest lake (which at the time had been pretty damn close). 

But that all happened later. That first night, something about her wordless acceptance had resonated with Molly. He’d made an effort to hang out with her, and been crushed when she vanished in the night. When she came back for the first time, Mona and Yuli made fun of how he couldn’t keep his tail below his waist, and Molly didn’t even care. 

He knew Gustav picked up on it, how much Molly liked her. So it didn’t surprise him that, one night, when everyone else had gone to bed, Gustav came to talk to him.

“Would you like some of this?” Gustav asked, sitting next to him by the dying fire with a bottle in hand. “I’ve no idea if you’re of drinking age, but there can’t be much harm in it. You seem like you’re done growing, at least, except for your hair.”

Molly rolled his eyes at the teasing (not the first and certainly not the last), but nodded. Gustav passed him the bottle, and Molly took a test swig. It didn’t taste terrible, which meant it was pretty high quality by their standards. 

“Nice moon out tonight,” Gustav said, looking up. A sliver away from being full, the larger moon hovered above the treeline, surrounded by twinkling stars. 

“It is,” Molly said. He’d let the firelight die so that the moonlight could bathe his face. He handed the bottle back to Gustav, who took a larger swig. 

“Nearly two years you’ve been with us,” Gustav reminisced. “Now we’ve got Yasha tagging along, for now. Suppose I should be expecting someone else two years from now.” 

“You won’t find anyone better than what you’ve already got,” Molly said. “By which I mean me.”

Gustav chuckled. “I don’t know. Yasha’s pretty handy. And she seems to like you enough to come back whenever she runs off.”

“What have I got to do with it?”

“She always goes to you first when she comes back.” Gustav leveled a ‘come on now’ look at Molly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You two are thick as thieves, as much as one can be without knowing a thing about the other.”

“She only likes me because of my fancy ice powers,” Molly said. Yasha eyed his swords with more interest than she did him, at least as far as he’d noticed.

“And those are plenty interesting, but that’s not all of it.” Gustav glanced back up at the moon, and set the bottle aside. “You’re not half interested in her yourself, if I see right.”

Molly rolled his eyes. “What conversation is this, now?”

“Just a talk,” Gustav said, laughing. He patted Molly’s knee. “Just a talk. A lot’s changed in a year. You talk, you have strange ice powers, and we’ve gained a new member who’s reluctant to stick around.”

Molly glanced at Gustav, puzzled. “I’m genuinely not sure what point you’re trying to get across.”

“To be frank, I’m not sure either.” Gustav laced his fingers together, leaning forward to catch the dying warmth of the fire on his face. “You like the moon, don’t you, Molly?”

“Of course,” Molly said, startled.

“I never told you this before,” Gustav said, “but the night before we found you, as we were traveling, we took a turn we weren’t supposed to. I was leading the train, and we came to a fork in the road. And I looked the way I’d planned to go, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. But I looked the other way, and the whole path was laid out with light. I could see every bump in the road. And so I turned the way I could see, obviously, and the next morning we came across you. Weren’t you a sight.” He half smiled to himself. “If I saw you now next to you then, I couldn’t have called you the same person, even with the...” He gestured to his face.

“Tail?” Molly suggested. Gustav laughed again.

“What I’m saying is,” Gustav said, “the moon gives many gifts. She led me to you, and that was good, wasn’t it? I know you know something similar of it, given how many late nights you stayed up at first.”

Molly nodded, slowly. “You weren’t the only one she led,” he said. Gustav nodded, too, as if he’d expected such a response.

“Now, someone who gets her attention like that,” he said, “I don’t think she’s liable to forget them soon. And you’ve got this girl who’s pale as anything, and I’m not looking to read into it, but I don’t know if anyone could ignore that kind of sign.”

“You think it’s a sign?”

“I think it’s something,” Gustav said. “I think you two fit together like you’re both missing from the same puzzle. Whatever that is, I can’t begin to guess. And as soon as she showed up, you discovered these...ice powers.”

“Blood powers,” Molly said.

“Don’t call it that, you make it sound like necromancy. Anyway.” Gustav cleared his throat. “What I’m saying is, I think there’s something important going on here, Molly. Or maybe the prelude to something important. And I think it’s important that you know what you have while you have it.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Gustav smiled, small and with a thousand stories lurking behind it. “I’ve had important things myself,” he said. “Other than the carnival. Other than all of you. But this-” he gestured at the tents, the horses, the wagons. “-is all that I’ve held onto out of all the important things I ever had. Because I know they’re important. Do you understand me, Mollymauk? When you have something like that, you hold onto it. It can carry you far, and a lot of the time it’ll turn into more than you expect. But if you let it go, you’ll regret not following where it led forever.”

Molly watched, raptly, the stories that were passing untold behind Gustav’s eyes as he talked. It had never occurred to him before, that Gustav must have had a life before the carnival. Maybe even a family. 

“I understand,” Molly said. 

“Good.”

“I think the ice is something I knew before, though.”

“What makes you say that?” Gustav’s jovial mood turned to surprise in an instant.

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “But every time I do it, I keep thinking it looks familiar. Like I’ve seen it before.”

“‘Every time’? Don’t tell me you’ve been cutting yourself to practice.”

Molly, in lieu of answering, leaned over Gustav’s lap to reach for the bottle. Gustav caught his arm and turned it over so that the sticky shine of Orna’s painkiller salve was visible over the scabby cuts on his arm, overlapping old pale scars.

“Molly,” Gustav sighed. He let Molly take the bottle.

“It’s not because I want to remember,” Molly said defensively. “I just want to make sure I can do it, if I need to again.” He took a swig.

“Let’s hope you don’t need to,” Gustav said. “If Yasha doesn’t run off again, we’ve got some good muscle besides Kylre.” 

“I think she will,” Molly said optimistically. “She likes me, apparently, and I’m here.” 

“For as long as you don’t run off with her.”

“Why would I?” Injured, Molly turned a doleful gaze on Gustav.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Gustav said, lips twitching into a smile. “I only mean you’re so fascinated by her that you’d follow where she went, at least for a little. I’m not worried about you leaving for good.”

“Good, because I’m not going to,” Molly harrumphed, and took another swig. The stuff in the bottle was beginning to warm him up, and didn’t burn quite so badly going down. Gustav tugged it out of his hand to take a drink himself. Molly didn’t say anything about how he  _ had  _ been considering following Yasha to see what kinds of errands she ran. 

They sat in a companionable silence, taking turns at drinking. The fire died down to orange embers, but the night wasn’t chilly enough for them to mind. 

“Do you think I should remember?” Molly asked, the question bursting out half on accident. He was tipsy enough that he couldn’t bite it back.

“What, the ice stuff?” Gustav made an effort to straighten his slumped posture. 

“Just in general.”

“I don’t know. Do you want to?”

“No,” Molly said, petulantly. Gustav knew  _ that  _ already. “But do  _ you  _ think I should?”

Gustav shrugged languidly. “I can’t say I’m not curious to know a thing or two about who you were before, and what happened. But it’s not my decision to make. Besides, I like you fine right now, Mollymauk.”

Molly tilted right over and sprawled out with his head in Gustav’s lap, mostly on purpose. He’d tried before to lean his head on Gustav’s shoulder, but his horns made it impossible. Gustav made a startled noise, and then started absently combing his fingers through Molly’s hair. It was very soothing. 

“I like me too,” Molly said, staring up at the moon. It offered no answers that he didn’t already have.

“Well, good.”

“You’re okay too.”

Gustav snorted. “You ingrate. ‘Okay’?”

“Jury’s still out on higher levels of affection. Check back in the morning.”

Gustav flicked the base of Molly’s horn, making him grimace from the weird tingly feeling in his nerves. Gustav  _ knew  _ he hated that. “How ‘bout the jury hurries up and realizes that I’m great?”

“The jury will consider it,” Molly said, as dignified as he could manage. “They’ll sleep on it.”

“Then go and get to sleep. Go on,” Gustav said, louder, when Molly groaned. “I can keep watch, you’ve got to be out and about when we get into town tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Molly muttered, dragging himself upright again. “G’night, Gustav.”

“Good night, Molly. I’ll see you in the morning. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could've written more of molly and yasha's adventures, but we all know where they ended up. i like how it turned out anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> probably there will only be one more chapter of this - I was gonna wait until I'd finished it to post, but hey why not?
> 
> also i stand by my assertion that molly is basically the d&d version of jack frost from rise of the guardians


End file.
